Windows 8 - The enemy of creativity

Microsoft recently released a Preview (or beta) version of its upcoming operating system, Windows 8. I don't normally bother with beta versions of code, but I was intrigued enough by all the talk of the new Metro interface to download the preview and give it a test run. What follows is my experience of the OS in its beta form and why I believe Windows 8 is the enemy of creativity.

Metro

Metro, Windows 8's User Interface, isn't exactly new. Anyone with an XBox360 or a Windows 7 phone will know exactly what the "tiles and text" interface looks like - but in fact it's even older than that; a very similar interface could be seen in Windows Media Centre. To my mind, and there are certainly better qualified people than me to comment on the usability of this interface, it seems a very clunky UI, one which has been lifted wholesale from one of those coffee-table books on graphic design that trendy people have at home.

What I am qualified to talk about, however, is my experience interacting with Metro with a mouse and keyboard. In a word: ghastly. Metro was designed to be a multi-touch interface and in that environment, with its associated "tap", "pinch",  "swipe" and etc. metaphors it works quite well. Even on the XBox360, with the simpler control pad (or, if you're unlucky enough to have bought one, Kinect's god-awful "wave and shout" mechanisms) the experience is passable. However once you replace any of those control mechanisms with a trusty mouse and keyboard things go rapidly down hill. The major, irrecoverable, problem is that all the metaphors and paradigms you have learned since the mainstream introduction of GUIs in the mid 1980's for the most part no longer exist. Gone are buttons, sliders, scrollbars - pretty much all of the UI widgets you are used to and comfortable with and, importantly, knew how to use. This becomes more apparent and more problematic if you consider Metro in a traditional PC environment connected to a large (or multiple large) monitors. In these scenarios touch interfaces are just an irrelevance and a hindrance - who in their right mind would want to start swiping and pinching three large 24" monitors sitting on their desktop?

Another major problem is Metro's "display and suspend" model of application management. Smartphone users will be familiar with this - you open one application full screen at a time and in order to switch to another you suspend the current app and then open the second full screen. This might make sense on a mobile device, but it is a ludicrous model on a desktop PC and a huge step backwards from the taskbar.

After about 20 minutes of frustration with Metro I went looking for the desktop. And I didn't like what I found.

The Desktop

It took me all of about 2 seconds to realise there is something unspeakably broken about Windows 8's desktop: there's no "Start" button! So how are you supposed to launch your programs? Well here's the kicker - you have to go back to Metro, clumsily navigate your way to the application you want to launch, click on it and if it's an application that doesn't run natively in Metro it gets launched in the desktop. What an utterly brain-dead bit of design this is. You want to quickly copy something from Excel into Word? Well you're going to have to jump through some Metro hoops first.

So why on Earth are Microsoft so keen to ditch almost 20 years of start button and desktop experience? I think I know the answer and I don't find it particularly palatable.

Creator vs. Consumer

For me a PC is a creative tool as much as it is anything else. With my PC I can create letters and documents, spreadsheets and databases, graphics, sounds and videos; I can write code, create websites, analyse data, collaborate, share, engage, work and entertain.

With Windows 8 and Metro, with its focus on app stores and paid for downloads, Microsoft are effectively saying "we don't want you to create; we want you to consume". And what does Microsoft want us to consume? Exactly the sort of premium-priced, corporate, mass market, X-Factor inspired, low-quality, populist rubbish that PCs give us the ability to ignore by creating our own content.

Windows 8 is a cynical and calculated move to turn us all into consumers, one which will hopefully backfire on Microsoft as PC users world-wide reject the "reimagined" Windows and turn to alternative operating systems. And you thought Vista was bad!